Change for change's sake

I read this excellent post the other day by our dear friend James Turner. Go ahead, read it, I’ll wait; it’s short.

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Did you read it? Seriously, go read it. Also, while you’re at it, I would highly recommend subscribing to James’s list. I always get something useful and inspiring from it, and it’s a quick read (indeed, it’s where I got the idea for the “60-second post” structure that I’ve adopted for Jamie’s list!).

Okay! So, now that we’re all caught up: where I relate what James was talking about to diy music production is in an observation I’ve had regarding my working practices.

I tend to buy a lot of plugins. (We’re a married pair of working artists, so I try never to pay full price — if I see something I want, I get on the company’s mailing list and I wait until it’s on sale.)

There was a point a while back where it was starting to feel a little ridiculous. Like, I have purchased easily over 400 plugins. (I’ve been at this a while.) And I grappled with that for a long time! Am I just being compulsive? Should I stop? I could objectively never buy another plugin again and make amazing-sounding records until I died. I have an embarrassment of riches at this point.

But what I realized is that, even if I don’t need it, new gear helps reinvigorate my creative process. And I think that’s what James was getting at in his post — strategies for keeping stagnation at bay. And new sounds help keep things fresh for me.

And that’s vital. Because if producing isn’t feeling fresh and exciting for me, then there’s very little chance that the records I make will feel fresh and exciting. And that’s a no-go.

As though for the first time — jamie